S a bit of light relief, I’m going to turn now to commenting on something interesting that I keep seeing happening in the blogosphere. I notice it mostly in relation to the question of whether Buffy the Vampire Slayer is feminist… but I was also struck by how the same kinds of questions came up for me in relation to a discussion on the delightfully polemical I Blame the Patriarchy about feminist science fiction. Yup, that’s right, wading into these debates. Probably not terribly wise, but ah… there it is. Light and unwise.
The thing that strikes me about these kinds of conversations (aside from the apparent wilfulness of those who fail to recognise the sublime wit of the Joss-master (tongue,tongue,tongue-in-cheek! well, almost)) is the way that one person will list what they see as feminist aspects of, say, Buffy – she kicks demonic arse, she sasses da baddies, she makes her own decisions, whatever – only to be responded to by another person who will list what they see as the anti-feminist aspects – SMG got soso skinny, she’s all blonde white and all-american, and she gets beat on every episode. These discussions happen as if there’s a kind of quantity play-off, where each negative is taken to cancel out a positive, so if there’s a positive still standing at the end, the show is proven to be feminist.
I wondered a similar thing when blamers were asked to suggest feminist sci-fi (and point out the huge amounts of ridiculously terrible misogyny in much sci-fi). Disagreements, as one would hope, were rife. But there was also a kind of implicit ambivalence about claiming any given text as feminist. Was a feminist text one in which the women were only ever empowered? Could a feminist text have women depicted who were having a rough time? What about if they were having a rough time at the hands of men? One example, I think, was The Handmaid’s Tale, held up both as feminist canon and partriarchy page-ified.
I couldn’t help feeling, occasionally, as I read through the comments, that the only book that would fit some definitions of being feminist was one in which all the women were empowered, strong, capable, gentle, never ever got bad-mouthed or beaten on, never ever did those things to anyone else; yet even these could be understood as (in some ways) anti-feminist because of the requirements made of women to be perfect. The perfect feminist sci-fi, then, seemed to be an impossible story in which conflict was almost impossible because it was a utopia. No, that’s a little unfair, but: is a novel feminist because the women in it don’t struggle? Or, rather, does sci-fi that depicts women struggling against patriarchy (and maybe not overthrowing the entire system of government etc) simply perpetuate patriarchy?
People claim that audiences are post-modern these days, but these kinds of discussions make me less sure. Because lying behind both these discussions is the implication that, in the end, a text will come out feminist or not feminist over all. One singular meaning – or at least the outcome of equation [feminist] – [patriarchal] = average feminist meaning – must win out. Joss Whedon is either feminist dream-man or anti-feminist con-man.
But texts don’t really work this way (not to mention people!), and I don’t even mean in a Barthesian ‘meaning is in the eye of the beholder’ kind of sense. Texts are always radically and irreducibly plural. On my reading of Buffy the Vampire Slayer then, there are feminist threads and non- and yes, maybe even anti-feminist threads: she is a skinny blond remarkably white, middle-class cheerleader who in the true fashion of female leads gets skinnier as the seasons pass, and she’s also the always-dead horror-story girl-who-had-sex-this-one-time-and-must-pay who kicks demon arse and saves herself, the boy in distress, and the day. She does often operate as a lone, sovereign individual after a masculine archetype of heroism, and she finally discovers, having relied upon her friends for so much, that power shared is power to the power of n. Each contradiction doesn’t cancel the other out; both threads end up doing something, meaning something. I understand the desire to be able to say whether Buffy is a feminist hero or feministly hollow, but this requires slicing aside complexity and contradiction in an attempt to find a text to hold up as the feminist handbook or the ultimate anti-feminist con.
But I think this is more significant than I’m making out, and this is where this post links to the last one (betcha didn’t see that one coming, huh! Labyrinth of my mind!). Kittay showed that the way for challenges to normalcy to become legitimate is by establishing that legitimacy in and through normalcy of other kinds. It doesn’t excuse the perpetuation of mainstream, patriarchal and racist narratives in Buffy, but these narratives have a tradition which is precisely what Whedon offers a challenge to. That is, he tells a story that reiterates generic conventions, and yes, those generic conventions are often problematic, but he does it so that the story might be told and more, might be heard (by playing into our existing cultural literacies and what we enjoy). And he also troubles aspects of those conventions – maybe, according to some, not enough – but nonetheless, he troubles the assumption that women are helpless; the assumption that kids and pop culture are just dumb; the assumption that nerds are never “occasionally… callous and strange” (and FoucaultIsDead, you made my ellipsis all significant now! It’s just Willow’s “I am,” I swear!). Having Buffy and the Scoobies on television screens cleverly reiterating often problematic generic conventions and at the same time turning (some of) them on their heads helped make it possible for Veronica, Hiro, Jane, Nancy, Rose, River and a whole lot of other characters to make their way onto the screens. None of them do the world entirely differently, but how would we recognise such a world as our own anyway? Therein lies the rub about what is implied to be perfect feminist sci-fi: in a world not perfect, how would that perfection speak to us, change us, allow us to think differently? Maybe dialects are necessary, especially where we want stories we feel emotionally bound to. And maybe they’ll be what helps us to the new and foreign, to the other language we couldn’t have known otherwise, a language not perfect but carrying the promise. Then again, maybe they make that new and foreign language impossible, because in reiterating the privileged, they maintain that privilege, like I seem to have suggested in the post on Kittay… I remain uncertain.But I should probably try to work that one out.
June 5, 2007 at 12:39 am
Well, to be a bit nitpicky, BtVS isn’t sci-fi, it’s a postmodern horror show. Most of the conventions you mention are specific to horror rather than sci-fi.
Secondly, SMG got skinnier because she took up Tae Kwon Do (which is itself problematic, from a racial angle) and was training hard. Possibly that’s classist and fatphobic, but it’s not just about thinness being an ideal in women. Buffy (and the actress who played her!) got more physically powerful as she got thinner.
I think BtVS played into ideals of femininity in other ways, though. Almost all the women they included were femme, including femme lesbians. There was very little interrogation of traditional femininity (body-as-decoration), except when it was subverted to show how defeated the characters were (how Buffy appears scarred and dressed much more sombrely in Doppelgangland, Willow’s transformation at the end of Season 6, Faith’s fluctuations between a working-class “trashy” femininity and a working-class defeminisation). And it celebrated “empowerful” sexuality — women manipulating the images men have of them to trade on borrowed power. None of the women was ever really romantically fulfilled, either; there was always some kind of violence (disproportionately borne by women) intervening in relationships.
But generally, a sci-fi text is feminist when “feminist SF writers” write it. Yes, there is a whole sub-genre of SF written for, by, and about feminism. Which means that the same debates about feminism that happen in the movement happen within the genre. But it is thriving, and it does have quite a history.
I don’t think that precludes some other text (say, written by a man) to being discussed on feminist terms, but the thing is that the genre is defined by the people who write it, not the particular depictions of the female characters in it. A character is just a textual device, not a real person. Her femaleness is also a device, and when a text is feminist, it is using that femaleness to promote a feminist politics. Usually that will mean a glorious pro-woman future, but it can also mean a horrible dystopia. So long as there is a variety of feminism behind it, it’s feminist.
June 5, 2007 at 9:58 am
Thanks for your thoughts, Firefly! (And for stopping by. This whole comments thing is kinda exciting!)
And sorry if I made it seem like BtVS was sci fi… I don’t really think it is. I was more trying to demonstrate a tendency in approaching texts, I guess, than one in approaching a particular genre.
My main response to what you say is that I think there are problems with taking the author as the authority for what a text means. I don’t think that the author is fully dead, as Barthes might have had it, but I do think that a lot more goes into making a text meaningful than just what they intended: the context (so, for example, the generic conventions of BtVS are already shaped), individual idiosyncracies of reading, and of course culturally shaped ways of reading. I understand that there’s a sub-genre called “feminist SF,” but I’m not sure I’d want to claim that authors self-identifying as feminist will have books which are completely and absolutely and can only ever be read as feminist. This isn’t because I doubt their feminism, though. It’s because I doubt the feminism of the context within which they are read.
So, for (a slightly dodgy coz I’m going back to BtVS) example, in order for SMG’s thinness as the seasons go on to signify anything other than the usual fatphobic TV-styled female body, you need a particular kind of reader – one like yourself who knows from extra reading that she was training hard. And even then, I don’t think that knowing that she’s training erases the fact that her on-screen physicality reiterates problematic norms of beauty. That is, the two threads co-exist, feminist and non-feminist (if we want to call them that). In the same kind of way, I don’t think that the feminism of the author can guarantee the feminism of the reading. I suspect that Joss Whedon, for example, would claim that there’s a variety of feminism behind his work… (which would seem to fit your definition?) yet you seem cagey about claiming BtVS as feminist…?
June 6, 2007 at 1:29 am
Well, I don’t think fictional texts become feminist or not because of how they’re read. No more than I’d say that non-fiction works by feminist are feminist or not because of how they’re read or who reads them. Which isn’t to say that authorial voice is commanding and determining, but that the production of texts occurs in particular historical, social, material circumstances, and the text is invested with the author’s response to those as a subject (in ways the author herself might not anticipate).
And yeah, feminism isn’t a static thing with a fixed meaning, but the history of feminism has to be acknowledged when reading a feminist sf novel from, say, the 1960s, otherwise it makes little sense. The exact implications of the text for feminism now is a different issue; but you have to take the good with the bad in feminism. You can’t claim a heritage including suffragettes and forget white feminism that, for example, opposed black suffrage.
The fact that the text promotes the feminist movement at the time it was made makes it feminist. That doesn’t make it “good feminism”. There are plenty of feminists who have problematic politics, but that doesn’t make them non-feminist.
So, whether it’s “good feminism” or not depends on the audience, while whether it’s feminist at all doesn’t; that depends on the context it was produced in.
In that sense, whether BtVS is feminist or not depends on whether Whedon and Marti Noxon are considered feminists. I don’t think I’ve ever heard either of them claim to be feminist, although they explicitly refer to feminist principles informing BtVS. Some would exclude Whedon because he’s a man (which doesn’t prevent him from being pro-feminist or a good ally, but those are different, and perhaps not enough to author “feminist texts”).
In any case, Angel, Firefly and Serenity are not feminist, IMO, and even less informed by feminist principles than BtVS, and at times outright misogynistic. (I still like Firefly, though. That’s where my username came from!)
June 6, 2007 at 7:43 pm
I totally hear what you’re saying about the specificity of context inflecting what the author tries to put into a text—and it’s an important point, for sure—but I have more questions about that now: how do we know an author’s intentions, especially those from another historical or cultural moment? It seems to me that all too often we assume to know what they intended based on what we get from the text, but what we read in the text is always shaped by our context. I guess I mean that if the authorial voice is not “commanding and determining,” as you say (and I agree), then I am not sure that we can separate out what was ‘intended’ (which already assumes some kind of self-presence/transparency on the part of the author) from what we read in it. And so I’m not sure if relying on the feminist self-identification of authors is sufficient to make their texts feminist.
The claiming of feminist-ness is interesting too, here. I mean, to take up the non-fiction feminist text question: there were those who argued that not only was Irigaray’s early work not feminist, it was anit-feminist. Yet she claimed it and herself to be feminist. One of the comments I remember most vividly from the discussion of feminist sci-fi on I Blame the Patriarchy was about Handmaid’s Tale, where Ozma said “Did anyone else think the Handmaid’s Tale was a confused manifestation of patriarchy-eroticizing that only masqueraded as patriarchy-blaming? it struck me more as mashup heterosexist sex fantasy of the “every woman loves a fascist” variety than as feminist literature.”
Is Margaret Atwood feminist? I think so (pretty sure she says she is). Is Ozma just wrong? Or is something more going on here (this is what I was trying to suggest in the original post)
Or, alternatively, are Joss and Marti feminist? Who decides that one, and how? Most people seem to want to do so on the basis of their texts, which leads us back into the same circle (I think).
As far as Angel, Firefly and Serenity are concerned, I agree that Angel’s pretty terrible on the misogyny front lots of the time (which I think is why I like it least of the Whedon TV ouvre); I think that Firefly and Serenity do, however, have their moments of being feminist. And I guess I want those moments to matter, in alongside those other moments that contradict (not that that means I want to call them simply ‘feminist texts’.)
Sorry to be so longwinded. I can’t tell if we’re talking past each other anymore!
June 6, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Well, we have direct statements from authors about what they did intend. Not all make statements about what they want to produce, but many do (being people who professionally put things down in durable formats and all). And in the case of Buffy, we have Joss and Marti publically making statements about the show using feminist language & concepts.
Obviously that’s also subject to the same issue — interpreting what authors mean by their statements about their work is just as context-dependent as interpreting what they say in the work. But there is a strong level of intertextual interdependence there, what with both things coming out of the same peoples’ minds, often in the same period of time. That doesn’t mean that they’re some kind of time capsule that doesn’t pick up new meaning after they’re written, but the latter meaning doesn’t erase the former, it builds on it.
Which is, I guess, to say the “authenticity” of a particular interpretation of a text is context-dependent, but not in a presentist sense.
Thought I’d point out this post on Larvatus Prodeo which deals with this issue: http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/06/05/authors-intent-etc/
(And let me just say here that I don’t think Fahrenheit 451 is at all feminist!)
As for the discussion at IBtP (I read it a while back), I have definite problems with many of the practices of commenters there. A lot of people have called into question the practice of feminist “boundary-policing” (naming anything that doesn’t fit their version of feminism, whether it was produced by a feminist or not, as anti-feminist) that goes on there. And my comments about something being “bad feminism” as opposed to “non-feminist” were directed at that.
I really do think that feminism is something which can’t be policed in that way. We can discuss the effects on feminism of various principles or positions being claimed as feminist, but not whether they’re “really” feminist or not. Perhaps I’d change my position on this if feminism were being threatened by people claiming it for all kinds of anti-woman practices, but I don’t think that’s the case.
I think it’s valid to question the feminist credentials of self-proclaimed feminists, because we always need to be re-evaluating our politics. But boundary-policing is an unnecessarily harsh way to do that. Feminists make mistakes too.
And with BtVS, Angel and Firefly/Serenity, I like them for their entertainment value, but my desire, as a feminist, to see a better world is also a lens I enjoy them through. I don’t think a text needs to be feminist to be enjoyable, but part of the enjoyment can be feminist enjoyment.
In some ways, the non- or anti-feminist moments in a text undermine its feminism, but it’s a text — we can think about it and re-imagine things about it in terms of other feminist principles or just decide to hate parts of it that don’t mesh with our politics and use what it does offer to build a vision of a feminist future. (Sometimes the consecutive and interdependent “feminist” and “anti-feminist” moments can distract, though. Creating associations between the feminist and the anti further complicates an already complicated politics. For me, being able to imagine a future at all has meant I’ve had to distance myself from conservative and privileged representations of the world; immersing myself in progressive radicalism is more what enables my imagination these days.)
I don’t think we’re talking past each other at all. I’ve felt like this exchange was productive. And don’t worry about being long-winded — I am too!
June 7, 2007 at 12:46 am
Yeah, okay, I had this thought just after I posted the last comment (and then rescued it out of akismet… I’m not sure how they decided I was spamming my own blog, but with the mood I was in it seemed vaguely profound): which is basically, what I resent (wow, it seems I’m suddenly feeling much more strongly about this!) is the ideal of purity that winds up being bandied about in this textual border-policing. So Handmaid’s Tale becomes a purely anti-feminist or at least non-feminist novel because it depicts (a particularly horrible form of) patriarchy, apparently, and any of the possibility of understanding that text as critique, say, of the logical outcome of misogynist tendencies disappears. Because the text can only do one thing. Purely.
Oh, and I understand the attempt to get at authorial intention through, say, extratextual texts. And with Joss some of those texts are acidic and fun, too. But my point, I guess, is that even with those claims, they can’t control the reading, and as such, can’t control the text. Meaning is an impure result of authors, readers, contexts all coming together. Occasionally I run into people whose readings of BtVS completely freak me out because they’re so conservative; yet I can’t deny that they arise out of the same text. More importantly, I don’t see why I should have to, in order to say that BtVS does some feminist stuff (which I often enjoy!) which seems to be the way those conversations happen online. (Not this one, though, thank god!… erm… or, rather, Fire Fly!)
So when I say that I don’t think authorial intent is enough to decide a text’s feminism or not, I don’t mean to call into question the author’s feminism – in fact, I think my thoughts on this thoroughly problematise this, especially as it wound up happening on IBtP. It’s just that their feminism I don’t think can be a guarantee, and nor should it be what has to be put on the line in any discussion of their text. (Seriously, were I Margaret Atwood, I reckon I’d be pretty upset.) Besides, I’m really not sure that the production of any given text is entirely and absolutely within its author’s conscious control. I don’t doubt that every text winds up meaning things its author never ever thought of, and never intended. Y’know, like claiming BtVS was sci-fi.
Of course, I agree with you that the mix of feminist and non- or anti-feminist moments can be complicated and problematic. I just want them to stay complicated and problematic, rather than being resolved with a ‘feminist’ or ‘anti-feminist’ stamp. (I’m imagining passports into Feministland here; I think I need sleep.) Because – and I guess hits is what I was trying to get at in the latter half of my post – I think that there is some kind of strength – though I wouldn’t want to overstate this – to the co-existence of the accepted-and-politically-problematic-but-sometimes-appealing with the progressive-feminist-innovation; namely that the appeal of the familiar generic conventions allows the progressive edge to take hold.
June 7, 2007 at 12:47 am
Oh and thanks for the link. I’m looking out for more Aussie content to be reading!
June 10, 2007 at 2:18 pm
So much for light relief! I put of replying here cos of the length and stuff going on offline.
I take your points about authorial intent not being able to control the reading, and that an author’s feminism is what’s put on the line when discussing the “feminism” of a text, but I don’t think that reading makes a text, or is the only important thing about a text.
I do believe that a text is a material thing that occurs in time and space and is shaped by things around it. When you get people having a discussion about, say, Ancient Greek tragedies (about which I know very little, BTW), they’ll refer to its material context to make sense of it (e.g. non-slave women in Ancient Greece had very few freedoms). Or they’ll refer to their own material context to critique it (e.g. women today participate in democracy because we’ve largely given up patriarchal notions of women’s inferiority so the tragedies can’t tell us much about gender politics). And in many cases, lack of understanding about the material context of the text’s production hampers understanding of it (e.g. the ahistorical version of Hinduism presented by organisations like the VHP, through promoting study of the Bagavad-Gita, without any mention that it was written some years after the Mahabharata or the political context it was written in — to counter conversion to Buddhism).
Again, that’s something which is limited by our ability to apprehend history, but when you’re talking about something fairly recent, which occurs in a social and political context that’s contiguous with ours in the present, then feminism is gonna be a fairly major contributor to that context. The text stands in a direct relationship to the historical moments that feminism brought about (including the ‘backlash’). The reading doesn’t change that, although that might not make much of a difference to a reader (since they also stand in direct relation to historical moments).
I’m finding Aussie content hard to find… do we even have a blogosphere of our own or are we just the idiot cousins of the Americans again?
June 10, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Life does tend to take over occasionally, which is often a good thing, though it seems that you’ve had heavy things on recently, so I hope that your offline stuff was… not heavy. Light, even, maybe…!
Okay, I think I’m noticing something about where the difference between how you’re talking about texts and where I’m talking about texts lies. Correct me if I’m wrong, of course (this really isn’t intended as a misrepresent-y thing, just a clarification). I don’t think I think that texts actually have a meaning that’s just there on the page or the screen and so on, but some of the things you’re saying do seem to imply that. When you say that a text “stands in direct relationship to [a] historical moment,” I’ll agree with that, but I also don’t think that that means that the text hangs onto (or ought to hang onto) all that meaning in and of itself, which seems to be something of what you’re saying…? So I totally agree about the history thing, but for example, even when one gets some of the history of gender politics in Ancient Greece (which is limited to high school knowledge for me), I still don’t think that that knowledge can tell you how the text was read by ‘the Ancient Greeks’ even just for that gender politics, nor can it tell you all of the stuff that the text was informed by in its production (that is, what the author, writing for a contemporaneous audience, might have ‘intended’ (though I stand by my ‘authors just aren’t self-transparent thing that I think the LP link you gave helps us get at.)) On a side note, some of that historical stuff can help demonstrate precisely how much contemporary (‘our’) culture shapes the reading of older texts (even though I think that we can’t get at how those texts were read contemporaneously). My students tend to be really weirded out when I point out that actually adam and eve didn’t eat an apple (as in, it’s never specified what the fruit is, I believe). It’s a useful point to make about how much contemporary readings shape the meanings of texts for us, and how much they demonstrate our own peculiar readings. (I use this example before looking at Leviticus and showing how oddly obsessed contemporary fundamentalists are with sex, especially gay sex – and then slip-slide into Foucault and the repressive hypothesis.)
But again, when you say that failing to understand the material context hampers understanding of it, my response would be that this seems to assume that there is a meaning that the text has all on its own, almost, maybe a truth of the text (that some people have an inadequate grasp of). I think my response to this problem would be that instead of seeing readings as right or wrong, adequate or inadequate, that these are instead different readings, each of which has its own specific investments. This still means that I can still say that the investments, say, of the VHP are problematic because they thereby disavow their own dependence upon Buddhism etc (I’m going off what you’ve said here; am absolutely ignorant of these texts and the history of their production and reading). An ethics of reading, here, maybe? (in the sense of ethics I’ve sketched elsewhere here, and certainly not a moral thing!!)
So I agree that a text might stand in direct relationship to its historical context, insofar as reading-with-historical-awareness might demonstrate particular things about the context of which that text is a part, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that reading is the right, best or only correct one. So, then, I might suggest that BtVS is both part of, contributes to and alters a particular textual context; for example, the attempted rape might be understood as picking up some threads of feminist arguments about rape and also challenging others (I’m think here about the rape’s-not-about-sex-it’s-about-power line which I think Spike’s “I’m going to make you feel it” really troubles (as in, he wants power over her desire not just over her).
The other thing is that I actually do think that there are really different ways of reading happening even in our current context. We may all be products of this context, but we are in very many different ways and through many different cultures. The word ‘culture’ covers a multitude of sins, really, and this is one of them. ‘Western’ culture and even ‘goth’ culture, say, are both thoroughly multiple and all subjects are positioned differently in relation to (and by and through) it (the given culture). So while I agree that feminism (or the results of it) might inform most people’s readings in some (tiny) way, I don’t think that all of those ways are equivalent.
An’ who ya callin’ an idjit cousin?! It does actually seem that way a lot of the time… though I’d prefer to think that Australian stuff is just a bit less hemmed in by its alleged geosociopolitical borders. In that spirit, here’s a link that, although I’m not a Deleuzean, seems to get at some of the points we’ve been discussing here, thanks to Spurious and Larval Subjects.
January 9, 2009 at 1:34 am
[...] claims. Part of this, again perhaps unsurprisingly, is because I stand by what I said about Buffy all that time ago: first, that it is a text like any other, with multiple meanings at work at any given time; second, [...]